Library Research Guides: ITAS / PEAC 210: Queer Italy: Background & Overviews

Welcome!

This guide offers some useful starting places and strategies for your research. Don't hesitate to contact me for help navigating these resources or finding, evaluating, or citing sources for your research topics. I'm happy to work with you on any aspect of the research process!

Karen Storz, Research & Instruction Librarian

Find Background & Overviews

Specialized encyclopedias, handbooks, companions, and other reference works can be good starting places for getting an overview of a topic, definitions of key terms, vocabulary for searching, and suggestions for further reading.

Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History
Publication Date: 2019
Provides a global view of LGBTQ history, covering significant figures and events worldwide.
Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers & Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present by Claude J. Summers (Editor)
Publication Date: 2014
Provides overviews of gay and lesbian presence in a variety of literatures and historical periods; in-depth critical essays on major gay and lesbian authors in world literature; and treatments of other topics and figures in the rich and varied gay and lesbian literary traditions.

The following databases allow you to search across multiple reference works at once.

Oxford Bibliographies Online This link opens in a new window
Oxford Bibliographies are research guides in a variety of subject areas. Combining features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this resource directs researchers to top scholarship across a wide variety of topics.

Encyclopedia Articles & More
This is a subset of SuperSearch that searches several reference databases at once.

Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
An interdisciplinary research tool that allows you to search over 300 reference works simultaneously, including limiting to audio or visual materials.
Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Biographies, bibliographies and full-text critical analysis of authors from all genres and eras, including the contents of Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Contemporary Literary Criticism.
Oxford Reference Online This link opens in a new window
Full text of over 100 reference books in all disciplines published by Oxford University Press
Sage Knowledge Online This link opens in a new window
Search across more than 100 encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference works.

Selected Books

Homosexuality in Italian Literature, Society, and Culture, 1789-1919 by Lorenzo Benadusi
Publication Date: 2017
The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy by Robert Aldrich
Publication Date: 1993
Through an explanation of forty figures in European culture, this book argues that the Mediterranean, classical and contemporary, was the central theme in homoerotic writing and art from the 1750s to the 1950s.
The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy by Lorenzo Benadusi
Publication Date: 2012
Brings to light important archival documents regarding the sexual politics of the Italian Fascist regime and adds new insights to the study of the complex relationships of masculinity, sexuality, and Fascism.
Italian Sexualities Uncovered, 1789-1914 by Valeria P. Babini; Chiara Beccalossi; Lucy Riall (Eds.)
Publication Date: 2015
Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores nineteenth-century Italian sexualities from a variety of viewpoints, illuminating in particular personal and political relationships, same-sex desires, gender roles that defy societal norms, sexual behaviours of different classes and transnational encounters.

ITAS / PEAC 210: Queer Italy

Research Librarian

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Welcome!

Find Background & Overviews

Selected Books